Tuesday, November 20, 2007

300 (STL 60)

I can't say I actually hated 300, the official action film of the Balco entertainment complex, but it disturbed, or maybe just annoyed, me on several levels. The first is it's shitty CGI-ness. Who exactly is this fooling? I guess the wheat fields outside of Sparta kind of looks like wheat, but the composition and texture distract from any real/"real" connection between actors. Speaking of "connection," the 'extreme intimacy' of Leonidas and Queen Independent Woman made me laugh out loud. Just like the violence, the sex was strictly for display. The violence as such didn't bother me, but as a purely aesthetic experience it imitates but falls short of the standards of John Woo. In its segmentation, it seemed to evoke the key combinations you would need to master in the video game version. Historical inaccuracy doesn't bother me, but the transplanting of contemporary mores and values on the past has the apparent good intentions of representing women and minority characters in positive light, but actually has insidious effects. By smoothing over and trivializing past conditions, present ideologies now seem more natural--that they easily extend over millenia. Lucky for us, that only applied to the portrayal of Queen Independent Woman, since the Persians were treated as racial stereotypes and King Xerxes as a nancy boy. American conceptions of Freedom, as a form of capital (yeah, the Queen did actually say "Freedom isn't free") to be hoarded is at very least ironic in considering it applied to the militaristic, slave-holding Spartans.

Yeah, so, anyway. I now get to prepend a stentorian "Spartans!" to any simple statement, such as "Spartans! Pass me the milk." Or "Spartans! I'm going to the store now."